Would it be a bad idea to go without a filter?

I have a Qu-Bit Tone right now and my sound sources are a plaits, a braids and a pico voice, but I more often than not just dont bother with the filter, when I do use it im a little underwhelmed by its effects. Getting rid of it frees up 18 hp and if I really need a filter I have a disting mk4 would selling Tone be a big mistake?

Your sound sources are all mostly full voices, designed to be used on their own. I have Plaits, and have yet to find a filter I like with it. Filters are fantastic with analog and simple digital oscillators, but with your sound sources--you can easily get away without one.

No, you certainly don't *need* one, but they make great sounds. I mean, I can make a whole track just with a filter as the only sound source. I think you probably aren't modulating your filter enough if they sound boring, filters do nothing exciting without CV.

That being said, the Qu-Bit Tone doesn't really have a whole lot of CV inputs, and it's frankly a rather basic LP/BP filter x4 channels. You'd be much better off with 18HP spent on a single-channel multimode filter with more exciting options.

I find that the Tone is wonderful once you have 4 voices to filter through it. There’s nothing very experimental or wild about it, but I bet there’s some creative patching I haven’t tried. Plus it can be used as 4 sine wave oscillators. But yeah you do you.

I had the same thought about it being a quad sine wave oscillator. You can use it to patch up some crazy FM sounds if you have some extra VCAs, EGs, and a mixer. If you don't have room for it in the rack at the moment to do the things you want to do, I'd suggest taking it out and putting it in the box. Then later on, when you have bigger case and a need for a quad filter or a bank of sine waves, bust it out.

That said, it is pretty large - which is why I've not grabbed one yet.

filters are pretty overrated. they are mainly an artifact of East-coast synthesis. look into West coast synthesis for more ideas of things to do with no filtering (technically an LPG contains a filter but it’s not resonant, and it also isn’t independent of the amplification.. so pretty much totally different).

Well except there are so many crazy interesting filters available today than at any point in history. Many of them have even incorporated ideas from west coast synthesis into their designs or just defy tidy categorization. Filter 8 from Joranalogue can be a octature VCO/LFO. Xoac's Belgrade can also be complex oscillator with it's dual resonant peaks. And even more vanilla multimode filters like Intellijel Polaris can be used to transform control voltages with phase shift slewed. So I think they are under-utilized by most people who have them in their rack because they wanted overestimated their need for east coast synth sounds when they started modular.

who said anything about swearing off? i just said they are overrated.. which they are, since many people consider them mandatory and they aren’t.

personally i have several filters.. a Morpheus, a Wasp, a Moog Werkstatt i use mainly for its filter, and a Polivoks. because they all have such different character. filters are great.

i wouldn’t normally recommend going completely filterless but you certainly can, and OP specifically said their filter wasn’t inspiring them so i just wanted to support them in that.

i’m not denigrating east coast, i just said filters are an artifact of the east coast.. which i stand behind. that doesn’t mean filters are dumb or that the east coast style is bad. it was really to emphasize to OP that there is a whole school of thought on synthesis without filters so they may find inspiration there.

sure.. these words have many ways they can be interpreted.. i see where you are coming from, though it isn’t how i intended it.

i meant “artifact” as in “something created by or in support of a technology”. because east coast synthesis pioneered the use of resonant filters. so to me the resonant filters are an artifact of the technology. but certainly not obsolete.

overrated wasn’t really the best word to use... because filters are awesome. i was trying to just make it clear they aren’t a necessity. many people treat them as if they are mandatory and that was the sense in which i was saying they are “overrated”.. that you don’t really need them despite all the people who say you do. but i do agree that word has mainly the wrong connotations so wasn’t good communication.

I agree with you-- in a subtractive monosynth the filter is maybe the most important thing and I think I see people new to modular bring that mentality into the modular which is a completely different instrument as far as I'm concerned.

When I first started looking at modular, I was definitely listening to a lot of demos of filters and oscillators and now 4-5 years later I have 15U of primarily CV modules.

I think wires and electricity are overrated when it comes to audio synthesis. Wires and electricity are getting accolades left and right, but do I *need* them? I have a perfectly usable harmonica that takes no electricity, and is wire (and patch cable free), plus it is perfectly portable, has built in scale quantizer, and get this, I can cover it partially with my hand to create an instant filter! Something to chew on for all those bougie wire apologists.

I know filters are also useful for taming feedback patches. However, I haven't even touched feedback patching. If you aren't getting anything out of the Tone, go with your instincts. With the number of voices you have at your disposal, I'd guess that the EQ on an outboard would be more your style.

FYI Maths can be used as a filter in a pinch, as well as the disting. Also, Rings is a technically a filter as well. So really you are just removing a bank of boring filters, and keeping the interesting one.

For me filters are kind of what make a synth a real instrument. All of timbre is based on overtones, and without a filter you can’t really shape complex voices. The overtones are the difference between a trumpet and a clarinet, and a filter let’s you control that with the twist of a knob. It’s what sets a synth apart from any other instrument.

Plenty of real instruments don't change timbre (and certainly few as drastically as a synth is capable of doing).

Also there are lots of other things that differentiate synthesizers from other instruments: how loud it is, how fast it can play, how many notes it can play simultaneously, how the notes are articulated, it can have a huge continuous pitch range, it can sustain infinitely, etc etc

And all instruments have a specific timbre native to the instrument. A synth doesn’t. So without a filter it just makes soulless beeps. That’s what I meant by “a filter is what makes a synth a real instrument.”

There are more ways to change timbre than I can type out on a phone, but the actual waveshape itself, additive techniques, the VCA, FM, ring/amplitude modulation, comparators/logic/rectification, sync, wavetables, karplus strong, etc.

Plenty of synthesizers have no filters at all and are definitely real instruments.

I can't speak to whether or not (electronically) a filter is the most basic way to change timbre. I don't think it's true from a historical perspective since the earliest synthesizers didn't have filters. As a player, I don't think of a filter as the most basic way to do it either because you will need something more complex than a sine wave and whatever means you use to accomplish that seems more basic.

Reasons to build a modular without a filter are many, but it's nice to do something different than you could do with a hardwired synthesizer (or else it's cheaper to get a hardwired synth, faster to work with, probably more portable).

I don't think it makes sense to think of timbre as a range either. The notion of timbre refers to partials (essentially any sound can be expressed as a set of sine waves with certain frequency/amplitude). This is why the "most basic way to do it" is by adding sine waves as far as I am aware.

When you hear a square wave, you're hearing the odd harmonics mixed with the fundamental. When you filter those out, you can think of that as changing the amplitude of those higher frequency sine waves.

If you haven't already, try playing around with additive synthesis. It's really cool because you can manipulate the partials as you see fit but it quickly becomes apparent why it's not more common: it's very difficult to design an interface for this and a lot of times using filters/wavefolders/etc etc is an acceptable compromise.

If you're posting plans for a first rack for critique/suggestions, consider starting small! It is recommended not to exceed 7U, 168hp (Dimensions of a Popular Intellijel Case), since your needs will likely change as you start using your modular and learning more about what can be done.